TABLE OF CONTENTS The mobile telecommunication industry throughout the world has shifted its focus to the 3G UMTS technology deployment, investing during the last decade in the design and manufacture of advanced mobile multimedia wireless networks. Since the introduction of 3G technologies in radio access, network planners faced a lot of new challenges when moving from the well-known concepts of 2G to the new and not so predictable 3G networks behaviour. Many of these challenges have been related to the design, planning, tuning and optimisation of operative multiservice radio networks.
Optimisation is a continuous process that is a significant part of the operating costs of the network. It consists not only on fine tuning the BS parameters like antenna tilting, azimuth or pilot power, but also relays on the optimisation process ought to improve the performance of the RRM procedures, which are responsible for ensuring reasonable operation of the network, by providing scenario-specific parameter sets to control the capacity-coverage-cost trade-off. Fast feedback loops in radio access network elements can be considered as adaptive RRM.
Many contributions to UMTS radio network planning and optimisation have been provided from COST 273, as well as some automatic planning algorithms, as explained in Section 9.2 of this chapter. Real-time tuning, which is related to RRM, is the subject of Section 9.3. The fourth section is devoted to present the results on UTRAN performance evaluation by means of simulation tools. Among...
